The humidity in South Florida wasn’t just weather; it was a lifestyle choice, a conspiracy to turn the air into a tangible, breathable soup that fogged up Leo’s camcorder lens for the fourth time that morning.
Ghost Gator
The humidity in South Florida wasn’t just weather; it was a lifestyle choice, a conspiracy to turn the air into a tangible, breathable soup that fogged up Leo’s camcorder lens for the fourth time that morning. He wiped it with his faded Pixies t-shirt, sighed, and pressed record again.
“Okay, Chaz. We’re rolling,” he said, his voice a monotone drawl perfected by too many late nights and too few viable career paths.
Chaz, his best friend and roommate, was standing in a patch of scrubby palmetto, one hand on his hip, the other pointing dramatically at a drainage ditch. He was wearing a mesh tank top that read “If You Can Read This, The Gator Won.” His lanky, sun-streaked hair flopped over his eyes.
“The modern world,” Chaz began, his voice taking on the practiced cadence of a man who’d just discovered philosophy 101, “is a cage, man. A gilded, neon-lit cage. They pave paradise, they put up a parking lot. But down here? Down here, the cracks are showing.” He gestured grandly at the ditch. “This isn’t just water. This is resistance. This is nature’s last stand.”
Leo zoomed in on a discarded Fritos bag floating in the murky water. A single mosquito landed on Chaz’s nose. He didn’t flinch.
“So, to be clear,” Leo said, lowering the camcorder, “your thesis for our documentary, ‘America: The Apathy,’ is that a drainage ditch behind a Winn-Dixie is the Alamo of the ecosystem?”
“It’s a metaphor, Leo. You can’t film a metaphor; you have to feel it.” Chaz finally swatted the mosquito, leaving a small smear of blood on his cheek.
“My camcorder literally only films things,” Leo said. “We’re two years out of community college and this is our masterwork? A documentary no one will watch about a drainage ditch?”
It was the summer of 1999. They were renting a cinderblock bungalow in a town called Paradise Palms, which was neither paradise nor contained palms, but did boast a spectacularly ugly strip mall. Their ambitions, much like the local water table, were murky and prone to occasional, alarming seepage. Leo’s was to film something that mattered. Chaz’s was to become the unassailable guru of a movement that consisted solely of himself.
Their quest for meaning, however, took a sharp turn from the metaphysical to the literal when a county park ranger’s truck with a missing muffler backfired down the road. They both jumped.
“Whoa,” Chaz said, his hand over his heart. “That was… a sign.”
“That was a ’86 Ford with a rod knock,” Leo muttered, but he dutifully raised the camera.
They followed the sound, which led them not to a ranger, but to a rusted, corrugated metal fence that marked the back perimeter of GatorGlade Adventure Park. It was the premier (meaning only) roadside attraction for a thirty-mile radius, a monument to human hubris and fiberglass. From the front, it was a glorious explosion of neon gators, airbrushed t-shirt shops, and a 40-foot concrete alligator named Gomer you could walk inside to buy fudge.
From the back, it was a different story. Through a gap in the fence, Leo’s camera caught a tableau that made his documentary instincts snap to attention. Three men in grimy coveralls were straining to hoist a large, tarpaulin-draped mass from the back of a flatbed truck. It was long, low, and writhing.
Cletus T. Bodine, the park’s owner, was supervising. You could spot Cletus from space; he was a man who wore his personality like a sequined jumpsuit. That day, it was an actual sequined jumpsuit, with a pattern of stylized alligators. His silver pompadour shimmered in the heat. He was barking orders, his voice a nasal twang that carried on the thick air.
“Easy, you lunkheads! That’s a million-dollar belly you’re draggin’! You scratch the hide, I scratch your paycheck! Which, coincidentally, will be zero!”
As the men grunted and maneuvered, a corner of the tarp slipped. A flash of white—impossibly, unnaturally white—emerged. It was a leg, thick as a small log, tipped with claws that looked like polished ivory. Then the tarp shifted again, and a snout pushed free. It was pale as moonlight, with eyes the color of rose quartz.
Leo’s breath caught. He pressed the camcorder so hard against the chain-link that his knuckles turned white. Chaz, who had been trying to find a “good energy spot” to meditate, froze.
“Is that…?” Chaz whispered.
“An albino alligator,” Leo breathed, his voice a mix of awe and horror. “A full-grown, albino American alligator. They’re… they’re almost mythical.”
Cletus clapped his hands. “That’s right, boys! Meet your new roommate! The crown jewel of GatorGlade’s ‘Ghosts of the Swamp’ exhibit! We’re gonna charge folks twelve ninety-nine just to glance at this beauty! Think of the t-shirt potential! ‘I Saw the Ghost and Survived!’ With a picture of a spooky gator! We’ll sell a million!”
The gator on the tarp, seemingly sensing the future of its own commodification, let out a hiss like a steam valve releasing. It thrashed, its powerful tail slamming against the truck’s gate. The three coverall-wearing men stumbled back.
“Whoa, she’s a feisty one!” Cletus laughed, unbothered. “Get her in the temporary tank! The concrete for the permanent one is drying as we speak! This is gonna be bigger than the Gator Jumparoo!”
Leo kept filming until one of the coverall men glanced toward the fence. He yanked Chaz by the arm, and they scrambled back into the palmetto scrub, hearts hammering.
“Dude,” Chaz said, his eyes wide. “That’s wrong.”
“It’s more than wrong,” Leo said, his mind racing. “That’s a wild animal. An incredibly rare wild animal. You can’t just… pluck a ghost alligator from the Everglades and put it in a concrete pit for tourist selfies.”
“It’s like… stealing a unicorn to pull a hayride,” Chaz agreed, his philosophical side catching up. “We have to do something.”
“What can we do?” Leo said, looking down at his camcorder. “We’re two guys with a tape and a theory about drainage ditches.”
Chaz looked at him, a strange, focused light in his eyes that Leo had never seen before. “We have the truth, Leo. The truth is the only weapon we need.”
“That’s a bumper sticker, Chaz.”
“It’s on my car, yes. But that doesn’t make it less true.”
________________________________________
Their first attempt at “doing something” was, predictably, a disaster. They decided to go to the authorities. The “authorities” in Paradise Palms consisted of Sheriff Dale Pucket, a man who looked like a melted basset hound and whose main concern was that teenagers were still using the abandoned cloverleaf interchange for drag racing.
They showed him the tape in his office, a space that smelled of burnt coffee and anxiety.
Sheriff Pucket squinted at the grainy image on Leo’s camcorder’s flip-out screen. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Cletus got himself a white one.”
“It’s an albino alligator, Sheriff,” Leo said, trying to sound authoritative. “It’s likely poached from a protected area. It’s illegal.”
The Sheriff rubbed his chin. “Illegal, huh? Well, now. Cletus, he’s a prominent businessman. Sits on the Chamber of Commerce. His wife, Tammy-Lynn, makes the best key lime pie this side of the Tamiami Trail. You got any proof where this gator came from?”
“It’s an albino alligator!” Chaz interjected, leaning forward. “They don’t just appear in roadside parks! It’s a stolen miracle of nature!”
“Son, this is Florida,” the Sheriff said, with the patience of a man explaining rain to a duck. “We got a fella down in Homestead who breeds pythons the size of school buses. A white gator ain’t exactly a smoking gun. Now, if Cletus starts sellin’ tickets to a baby unicorn, you give me a holler.” He dismissed them with a wave.
Dejected, they sat in Leo’s rusted Toyota Corolla in the sheriff’s department parking lot, the tape of their evidence already feeling useless.
“The system is rigged,” Chaz declared.
“Yeah, well, the system has a key lime pie lobby,” Leo said. He put his head on the steering wheel. “We need help. We need someone who knows about gators. And about Cletus.”
That’s how they ended up at the Swampy Palms Retirement Village, staring at a golf cart adorned with a faded “Gators for Global Justice” bumper sticker. Dr. Elara Vance, former head herpetologist for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, now “retired” to a life of shuffleboard and quiet indignation, was their last hope.
She was a lean woman in her late sixties with cropped gray hair, eyes that missed nothing, and the air of someone who had once stared down a twelve-foot bull gator with a clipboard and won. She listened to their story in her lanai, sipping iced tea while a ceiling fan spun lazily above them.
When Leo finished, she set her glass down with a decisive clink. “Cletus Bodine,” she said, the name tasting like something sour. “That man once tried to apply for a permit to teach alligators to water ski. Said it was for ‘educational purposes.’ The educational purpose was to sell tickets. He’s a poacher, a hack, and a man with the ecological conscience of a tire fire.”
“So you’ll help us?” Chaz asked, hope blooming on his face.
Dr. Vance looked at them, her gaze sharp. “I’ve been trying to get that fool cited for years. But he’s slippery. You have footage of him with a rare, unlicensed animal. That’s something. But we need more. We need to prove where he got it. If we can find the poaching site, we have a case.”
“So… we’re going on a stakeout?” Leo asked, a thrill of genuine excitement cutting through his cynicism.
“We,” Dr. Vance said, standing up, “are going to conduct a field observation. You two are going to stop dressing like you’re going to a Phish concert and listen to everything I say. This alligator, if it’s the one I suspect, is a local legend. The old Miccosukee fishermen call her ‘Pearl.’ She’s been in the Turner River area for decades. If Cletus took her, there will be signs. Vehicle tracks, airboat trails… and probably a whole lot of evidence he was too arrogant to hide.”
________________________________________
The stakeout was a symphony of incompetence. They used Leo’s Corolla, which had a broken A/C, and parked on a gravel road near the Turner River. Dr. Vance brought sophisticated equipment—a GPS unit, field binoculars, a cooler of water. Chaz brought a didgeridoo he thought might “ward off negative energy.” Leo brought three extra tapes and a growing sense of dread.
For two nights, nothing. Just swarms of mosquitoes that seemed to regard DEET as a light seasoning, and the distant, mournful calls of actual wild things.
On the third night, they hit the jackpot. A battered airboat, its fan a low roar, emerged from the mangrove tunnels, its navigation lights off. It pulled up to a makeshift dock Cletus’s men had constructed from old pallets. Under a tarp on the airboat, Leo’s zoom lens captured the unmistakable shape of a large, white alligator.
“He didn’t take just one,” Dr. Vance whispered, her voice trembling with fury. “He’s gone back for another. A juvenile. He’s trying to start a breeding program.”
Leo filmed, his hand steady for the first time in his life. He got the faces of the coverall men, the GatorGlade logo on their shirts, the distinct sound of Cletus’s voice crackling from a two-way radio.
“That’s it,” Dr. Vance said. “That’s the evidence we need.”
They were so focused on the capture that they didn’t hear the second airboat until its spotlight blazed to life, pinning them in the Corolla like bugs on a specimen board.
Cletus Bodine himself was at the helm, his sequined jumpsuit replaced with a camouflage ensemble that was somehow even more offensive. Two of his goons flanked him, looking mean and confused in equal measure.
“Well, well, well,” Cletus’s voice boomed across the water. “If it ain’t Nancy Drew and the Scooby Gang. Dr. Vance, you’re a long way from your bingo game.”
Dr. Vance didn’t flinch. She stepped out of the car, arms crossed. “Let the juvenile go, Cletus. You’re looking at federal charges.”
“Am I?” Cletus laughed, a dry, hacking sound. “From where I’m sittin’, I see three trespassers on private property. My property line runs right through that drainage ditch. And I got two of ‘em on tape, courtesy of my state-of-the-art security system.” He pointed to a cheap, bullet-shaped camera mounted on a nearby power pole.
Leo’s heart sank. They’d been so focused on him, they’d walked right into it.
“Now,” Cletus said, his smile disappearing, “you’re gonna hand over that little camera, son. And then you’re gonna forget you ever saw Pearl or her little friend. Or I’m gonna have Sheriff Pucket down here so fast to charge you with criminal trespass and wildlife harassment, your hippie heads will spin.”
The standoff lasted a tense minute. Leo looked at Chaz, who looked at Dr. Vance. She gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head.
With a feeling like swallowing glass, Leo ejected the tape. Cletus’s goon motored over, took it, and then Cletus held it up, grinning. “Evidence!” he crowed, then tossed it into the black water where it disappeared with a sad little plop.
“Get off my land,” Cletus said. “And remember, I know where you live.”
They drove back in silence. The mission had failed. The evidence was gone. Pearl was doomed to a life of concrete pits and photo ops. Dr. Vance looked ten years older, staring out the window.
Back at the cinderblock bungalow, Chaz sat cross-legged on the floor, uncharacteristically quiet. Leo sat on the couch, head in his hands. The camcorder sat on the coffee table, a useless brick.
“It’s over,” Leo said. “We’re done.”
Chaz looked up. “No, man. It’s not over.” A slow smile spread across his face. “He took our evidence. But he didn’t take all of it.”
Leo frowned. “What are you talking about? He took the only tape.”
“He took ‘a’ tape,” Chaz said. He got up, went to his room, and came back with a cardboard box. He tipped it over. A cascade of VHS tapes spilled onto the coffee table. Leo recognized them. They were all of Chaz’s self-help tapes, his “Way of the Peaceful Warrior” and “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and a dozen other titles with names like “Attract Abundance Now!”
But on top was a black tape, unlabeled.
“You told me you were recording that night at GatorGlade,” Chaz said. “You said you’d popped a fresh tape in that morning. So while you were focused on the truck, I was just… you know, messing around. I had my dad’s old VHS-C camcorder. The one he used to tape my little league games. I thought, maybe I could get a cool shot of the sunset reflecting off the fence or something.”
He held up the black tape. “I got the whole thing. The truck. The tarp slipping. Cletus talking about the twelve ninety-nine. All of it. From a different angle.”
Leo stared at the tape, then at Chaz. The guy who communicated in bumper stickers and thought a drainage ditch was a battleground. The guy who brought a didgeridoo to a stakeout. He had been thinking ahead.
“You… you filmed it?” Leo breathed.
“I’m your roommate, man,” Chaz said, shrugging with an attempt at nonchalance that didn’t quite hide his grin. “When you have a documentary filmmaker in the house, you pick up a few things. Also, you left the other camcorder in the car. It was just sitting there on the passenger seat.”
________________________________________
Armed with the new tape, they bypassed Sheriff Pucket entirely. Dr. Vance used her old FWC contacts to get a call into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Leo, in a moment of inspired desperation, called a reporter he’d seen do a sweeps week story on “Pythons in the ‘Glades” at the Miami Herald.
The plan was chaotic, multi-pronged, and depended entirely on timing. The FWC said they could get a warrant, but it would take 48 hours. The reporter, a cynical woman named Linda with a shock of red hair and a tape recorder that seemed like an extension of her hand, promised to meet them at GatorGlade the next morning. But they had to have something “visual.”
That night, Leo and Chaz executed their part. It was the dumbest plan Leo had ever been a part of, which was saying something.
Under the cover of a moonless sky, they returned to the gap in the fence. The new “Ghosts of the Swamp” exhibit was a half-finished concrete basin, covered with a chain-link roof. Inside, illuminated by a single, harsh security light, was Pearl. She was magnificent. Nearly twelve feet of pure, milky-white power, her rose-quartz eyes scanning her barren prison with ancient, reptilian disdain. In a smaller, temporary pool nearby, the juvenile albino swam in nervous circles.
“Okay,” Leo whispered, looking at the padlock on the gate. “Now what? I didn’t think we’d get this far.”
Chaz pulled a bolt cutter from his backpack. It was bright pink and had a “For Ornamental Use Only” sticker on it. “Found it in the garage,” he said. “It’s about intention, man.”
It took them ten minutes of grunting and sweating to snap the cheap lock. Just as the gate creaked open, a security light blazed to life on the main building.
“Hey!” a voice yelled. It was one of the coverall goons, emerging from a trailer with a flashlight and a bologna sandwich.
“Go, go, go!” Chaz yelled, shoving Leo through the gate.
What followed was a three-ring circus of slapstick. Leo, trying to film and run, tripped over a garden hose. Chaz, attempting to be a distraction, started doing a bizarre, flailing dance in front of the security light, yelling “Over here! Look at my aura!”
The goon, sandwich forgotten, chased them around the half-built concrete basin. Leo scrambled up a pile of rebar, the camcorder still rolling. Chaz grabbed a push broom and held it like a staff, invoking the spirit of Bruce Lee with limited success.
Then, from the entrance of the park, came the sound of vehicles screeching to a halt. Headlights cut through the darkness. Voices. A lot of them.
“This is the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission! Open the gate!”
Linda the reporter was there with a camera crew. Sheriff Pucket was there, looking bewildered and holding a cup of coffee. And leading the FWC team was a woman Dr. Vance had called, a steely-eyed officer named Captain Reyes.
Cletus came running out of his office, his pompadour in disarray, wearing an alligator-patterned silk robe. “What in the name of free enterprise is goin’ on here?!” he shrieked.
Captain Reyes held up the warrant. “Mr. Bodine, we have reason to believe you’re in possession of illegally obtained wildlife.”
“That’s nonsense! I bought these gators from a licensed breeder in… in Nebraska!”
Chaz, still holding the push broom, pointed a dramatic finger. “Liar!” he bellowed. “We have you on tape! From the Turner River! Talking about the twelve ninety-nine!”
Leo, who had climbed down from the rebar, held up his camcorder. The little red light was still on. “It’s all here,” he said, his voice surprisingly steady. “The midnight airboat runs. The unlicensed transport. The tossing of our first tape into the river. You’re not a businessman, Cletus. You’re a thief.”
Linda the reporter’s cameraman was getting everything. Cletus’s face cycled through rage, disbelief, and finally, a kind of greasy panic. He tried to bluster, but the evidence was overwhelming. The juvenile alligator in the pool, the fresh tire tracks from the airboat trailer, and then, the piece de resistance, Dr. Elara Vance emerged from the shadows, holding a waterproof GPS unit.
“And these,” she said, projecting her voice for the camera, “are the coordinates I recorded from the poaching site. Matching soil samples from the airboat trailer are currently being analyzed.”
Cletus’s shoulders sagged. Sheriff Pucket looked at his coffee, then at the scene, and sighed the sigh of a man who realized his key lime pie pipeline was about to be permanently severed.
________________________________________
The aftermath was a whirlwind of press conferences, environmental magazine articles, and a court case that made Cletus Bodine a national symbol of tacky, ecologically catastrophic greed. He lost GatorGlade to a bank that had been eyeing the land for a strip mall, a fate that even Leo and Chaz found a little too poetic.
Pearl and the juvenile were released back into the Turner River area, under the watchful eyes of Dr. Vance and the FWC. Leo filmed the release. The moment Pearl slid from the transport crate into the dark, tannin-stained water, disappearing like a ghost returning to its realm, was the most beautiful thing he had ever captured.
His documentary, originally titled “America: The Apathy,” was retooled. It became “Ghosts of the Swamp: The Battle for Pearl,” and it won a student Emmy and actually got picked up by PBS. It even had a theatrical run at a small arthouse cinema in Gainesville, where it played to a packed house of eighteen people, two of whom were napping.
Chaz became a minor celebrity in environmental circles for a while, doing speaking engagements at colleges. His talks were famously incomprehensible, blending alligator conservation with new-age philosophy and his favorite bumper sticker slogans. He eventually moved to Costa Rica to start a “wellness retreat for traumatized sloths,” which Leo was pretty sure was just a shack on the beach where he sold coconut oil to surfers.
Leo, for his part, found his purpose. He became a documentarian, focusing on environmental stories in the Southeast. He never stopped filming, but he learned to put the camera down sometimes. To actually help. To be in the moment.
And sometimes, when he was back in Florida, he’d take an airboat out to the Turner River with an old cooler of sandwiches. He’d cut the engine and drift. And once in a while, on a quiet, moonless night, he’d see a flash of white in the black water—a patch of scales, a low-slung snout, a pair of rose-quartz eyes watching him from the mangrove roots. He’d smile, never reaching for his camera.
He didn’t need to film a ghost to know it was there.
~fin~